Two things that make
Michael S. Begnal such an impressive poet are his range and the delicacy—the
grace—with which he expresses that range, balancing erudition with freshness,
distilling broad learning in a sound like a baby’s scream. Unlike some of his contemporaries,
who case up their smarts in a vitrine, for display, Begnal’s skills drop with
wisdom and humility. Indeed, there is, in these two collections, a voice one
could easily mistake for a much older poet, and each of these books reads like
a “selected volume,” in which the library poems and alleyway poems, the
rainy-window poems and post-coital hotel poems are all artfully arranged to
give a sense of the scope of a long career. But Begnal is young: he’s just that
good. In Ancestor Worship (2007), a narrator visits Montparnasse
Cemetery in a piece that bounds
from sex to shit in two pages, from suicide to the yeasty immutability of
crotch. As an act of worship, an offering of the vernacular: “Baudelaire’s
grave / covered with green Métro tickets, / many-coloured flowers, / and a
sketch—/ Beckett’s bare— / Sartre’s respectable—.” Because the “worship”
imagined here is

not like the imaginedrituals of an old old agebefore iron or bronze,the metal of our mythology,. . .but the warm bloodthat flows through to this age, dangerous and violence in veins. . .the right hook of history,the slow arc of the punch,the strange figureon a modern city streetwho burrows into your eyeand says, “Who’re you?”

In these poems of street wandering and port wine, one
ancestor being worshiped sure seems to be Kerouac, in the best sense, of
child-like wonder at the sounds, at the endlessly fascinating task of
describing the world, “Grab the polaroid / and head down to where they spray
graffiti / on brick walls / and piss in alleys” reads a poem in Future Blues
(2012), the more recent collection, wherein a No Parking sign is as
likely—along with “piles of pallets / & another broad wall of brick”—to
constitute the subject of a poem, or the raw material out of which a poem,
about the act and function of poetry-writing, is constructed. That on each of
the pages of these two volumes Begnal makes us see something anew—a fresh
perspective on delivery trucks as well as seasons and wine and weather and
libraries full of previous writers, from Li Po to James Liddy—is their great
success. Yet here, amidst “my songs all of lonesome” and reevaluations of
surroundings—an ancient “stadium of white stone, / cracked blocks of sun” where
men eat tacos and sneak pills “and the peanut vendors never come around”—the
major themes of Begnal’s work are advanced, these being language as a product
of a given context—not only a place, but a time, a particular moment on a
particular street, be it Galway, Derry, San Francisco, or Madrid—and the sense
that through language not only are voices of the dead, our ancestors,
preserved, but that a community is established in and through such reading and
reciting. “Ancestor Worship” is thus the active establishment of a community of
voices the enduring presence of which is a defiance of time and death.This is a sophisticated concept, that, on the one hand “There’s no present /
just a continual becoming / past” on the page, in the text—there is only ever
that which has always already been written—and, as a result, poetry thus
offers collective “resistance to certain fixities.” Begnal is here informed not
merely by study of things written in English, but by global travel and—too rare
among Americans, whom he refers to, in a poem set in Prague
as “too many shorts-wearers, / oblivious to their own / incongruity”—serious
engagement with other languages. Most importantly, this mean Irish, in which
Begnal writes.Both books under consideration here have poems that, to a non-Irish reader,
remain—as Begnal writes about French television—inaccessible. “I am denied,” he
writes, straining “to penetrate the sound barrier / extracting random phrases
but no coherent sentences.” Yet there is a lesson here: that these are
words still living; that here is a poet assembling community from more than one
culture. This dual sense for language—again, one thinks of Kerouac—grants
Begnal a blessed ear, a sense for the entanglements of imagination and place,
memory and words. Here are lines set in Madrid:
“I don’t really speak Spanish / just know a few words / but I can fake it
pretty good.” “Because I, in my American, think of Mexico
/ I think Juárez while wandering . . . thin uphill streets lined with
cervecerías, / eat tortilla yum egg patata onion, / wandering, restaurants full
of pigs, / plates of fried squid in windows.”As one can travel with language, one can travel through language, as well: “The
closest I can get / right now to Mexico
/ is Texicanos corn chips, / ‘manufactured’ (not baked) / in Coolock.” Or dig
this fantasy, tinged again with what I take to be the inheritance of Kerouac,
and Kerouac’s San Francisco: “‘cause just up the street / was my Mexican place,
Burrito Salvadoreño, / and a hot married Salvadoreña // I always got hot
peppers, / always got hot peppers, / left impressive tips, / but feared the
imagery / of the black Latin moustache, / murderous, / vengeful husband.” In
the same poem, Begnal warns that “deep in the Mission
/ it was even more dangerous / ‘cause you were / out of your language.”It is refreshing and useful to read a young American poet so aware of that
sense of being in and out of language, whose poetry acts to “celebrate all the
dead in their graves” in their own contextual voices, even while he also
rhapsodizes about 25 cent porn booths and the neon pulse of a city rippling
through the night. I believe Begnal’s bilingual status grants him a rare gift;
that while he can write of “Solitary room freak-outs nobody knows the panic of”
he never confuses the subjective experiences of the self with the limits of the
world, knowing, rather, that the world inhabited by the living, reading, poet
is one in which—as he writes in “Samhain,” in Future Blues, one exists
in concert with those who went before. We are a compilation of our ancestors.Indeed, Begnal roots what he calls the “rebellion” of poetry in language’s
disavowal of temporality, that the written word maintains an “ancient
revolutionary movement / forever.” To “trust in language always” is thus to
“trust in a world, in a flicker, / in an echo, / speak, and they are present .
. . they are there, in a word or line / you thought was your own.” Forget the
spook-show metaphysics of Halloween, where the dead wander for a day: Begnal is
interested in poetry as a particular class of engagement with language—“the
poem is an action among / the most human (and animal) of actions”—which, in
this reading, becomes truly revolutionary, a defiance of time and death and a
revolutionary catalyst for an ideal community, “different but together and
equal, / agency and valency, / multi- Multi- MULTI-.” The fantastical “city
City CITY”
of Kerouac is here given a new gloss, one of ethical and political urgency. The
dead speak, and these subjective flashes from beyond the grave contribute to
what Begnal sees as a resistance not merely against “stasis” but also the
status quo of the capitalist “market.”Not that the author—like certain still-singing voices from the past—is not also
“freaking out” about the unknowable concrete reality of his own death, but
simply that life itself, as experience through language and manifest in the
process of writing poetry, is always collective, always involves our ancestors,
acknowledged or not. The Irish pieces here represent one form of
acknowledgement, as do the many references—from Goya to Ferlinghetti—sprinkled
throughout, and even the recognition that we are our own ancestors, that our
own writing represents some voice speaking from a moment now past, lost. I
“cannibalize myself,” the poet says, “I wrote days ago some of these lines.”The particular roots of the written word, testifying to a past by continuing to
speak, the community of poets assembled through veneration and continued
engagement with the voices of our ancestors. That these themes are engaged in
two books so fresh, so multi-faceted, smelling of assorted street cuisines,
desire and fear, drunken ecstasy and philosophical consideration—that is more
than impressive. These are remarkable books.